Thread: Surviving Chicago's sex slave trade

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Surviving Chicago's sex slave trade
August 7, 2005

BY ANNIE SWEENEY Crime Reporter


She was walking by the Freedom Monument -- a popular meeting spot in Riga, Latvia, and a symbol of the nation's independence -- when Alex Mishulovich introduced himself and made an intriguing offer.

Come to America. And dance.

He was looking for dancers at his clubs in Chicago -- his high-end respectable clubs where clothes stayed on. There would be nothing vulgar about it.

And she'd make $60,000 -- a fortune to a girl from a small Baltic country that had shed the bonds of communism not long before.

The girl -- whom the Chicago Sun-Times isn't naming and, for her safety, is identifying only as Z -- was 18, and had just graduated from high school. She'd studied ballroom dancing, but was uncertain what to do with her life.


HUMAN TRAFFICKING: BY THE NUMBERS
$250,000: The amount of profit that can be made from one woman

600,000-800,000: The number of people trafficked each year, according to the State Department

14,500-17,500: The number of people who are trafficked into the United States each year.

321%: The increase in investigations by the Justice Department between 2001 and 2004.

375%: The increase in Justice Department prosecutions (2001-2004)

200%: The increase in Justice Department convictions (59 to 11 between 2001-2004


FIRST IN A THREE-PART SERIES

Monday: Battling the problem
Coming Tuesday: Teen trafficking in Chicago



To Z, Mishulovich's offer was exhilarating.

It was also a lie -- something she discovered shortly after landing at O'Hare Airport.

Put up in a cramped apartment with other Latvian women, she was watched constantly, beaten and threatened with being sold as a prostitute. Her passport was taken away.

And the dancing? Really it was stripping. For maybe $20 a night.

She was a virtual slave -- a sex slave, a victim of "human trafficking."

That was nearly a decade ago. Today she's miles away, rebuilding after having helped prosecute her captors.

"We were all so . . . trusting," she said.

The Sun-Times, in a three-day series, is exploring the plight of Z, the alarming breadth of human trafficking, the international efforts to curb such illicit bondage and the ordeal of kids who are being plucked off Chicago's streets.



Widespread problem

There's a global pipeline with a precious commodity. Not oil -- people.

Hundreds of thousands of them, sold for somebody else's profit.

What it is, really, is slavery. Men, women and children forced or tricked into hard labor or the sex trades. This concept, this crime, has been around forever. A growing problem in some parts of the world, there's an increasing focus on combatting it, abroad and locally.

The Chicago Police Department's vice unit -- which recently arrested a Thai woman working here as a prostitute and wiring money back to her trafficker -- soon will have two people dedicated to investigating trafficking. They'll be scouring the Internet, periodicals and the streets, Police Cmdr. David Sobczyk said.

The unit also will be coordinating with social service agencies to help victims -- something a new statewide coalition also is focusing on, along with recent Illinois legislation.

In 2000, federal legislation further criminalized trafficking, creating new penalties, funding for victims and a new immigrant status -- T-Visas -- that allow victims a chance to live here permanently.

Since then, the United States has dedicated at least $295 million to address the problem in 86 countries, according to the U.S. State Department.

But between 2001 and 2004, the number of U.S. Justice Department investigations jumped from 106 to 340, prosecutions of people traffickers rose from 16 to 60 and convictions doubled from 59 to 118.

Trafficking can be lucrative for people like Mishulovich -- although he's paying the price now, having been convicted with most of his cohorts -- and it's often linked to organized crime rings. Profits from a single woman can average $250,000, according to some estimates. Now, Congress is considering new legislation that would provide money and more services for people who are bought and sold for profit in the United States -- in most cases, teens and even younger children who are forced into prostitution.

Estimates on the number of trafficking victims in the Chicago area are not available, although Sobczyk hopes his team will be able to get a handle on the scope of the problem.

The State Department estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are pumped through this underground pipeline each year around the globe. Between 14,500 and 17,500 make their way into the United States. Most find themselves in some form of servitude.

They arrive from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, from countries such as Latvia.

'So naive'



On a recent afternoon, nearly a decade removed from her ordeal, Z sat in her air-conditioned condo, just purchased with a relative who lives with her where soft sandy beaches stretch on and on.

When a reporter visited, Z was negotiating with the cable guy over how many channels she needed, musing at the endless choices and why anyone would need hundreds of offerings. On her counter sat small shopping bags from Godiva chocolate and Chanel.

She's relaxed, her model-like tanned figure fitting perfectly in light cargo pants and tank top; feet clad in gold-sequined flip-flops. Her eyes are light blue and her hair blond and board-straight. She's striking and comfortable, yet reserved. She weighs each detail of her story before she shares it in accented but strong English.

She is one of 454 people in the United States to be granted a T-Visa, which means she can legally work here and possibly stay permanently.

On this day, she is relaxing after spending a week studying for her real estate license, perched on a staircase in an open, bright, unfurnished apartment. Large colorful art prints lean on walls, waiting to be hung.

It's miles from Latvia, a former Soviet state where the government issued school uniforms -- "ugly blue, dark dark dark blue" -- and controlled everything, from the economy to the curriculum.

The daughter of two professionals, Z grew up in a nice neighborhood and had a good, happy childhood, she said. Life changed drastically in 1990 when Latvia declared independence and then fought the Soviets off one last time a year later during a coup attempt.

Like many in Latvia, which has been occupied much of the 20th century, she and her family celebrated freedom and a chance for new opportunities. But early on, good opportunities were hard to come by, and that's partly what made Mishulovich's offer so enticing.

In her mind, she'd be dancing in a revue or musical -- although in a bikini -- and would be making $60,000 a year. Mishulovich would get a cut of the money, and she'd have to pay him an initial debt -- between $10,000 and $20,000 -- for bringing her here and setting her up.

One day, though, she'd be living on her own and making good money to live a good life in the United States. "We were just like so naive you can't even imagine,'' she said, shaking her head slowly.

A gun to the head



Mishulovich and the others had no intention of ever letting the debt get paid down, authorities said. On a good night, Z would earn $500. And just about all of it went to the crew, who also checked her belongings at the end of the night, looking for hidden cash.

"It's not easy -- when I have to think about it, when I go back into what happened, it makes me feel really bad,'' she said. "I am just trying to move on. The good things are happening. I'm more grown up now.''

Her captivity would last just under a year and be filled with anxious moments, but also some sad and just plain strange moments, Z recalls, talking in a hushed tone, as if to be sure no neighbors can hear her.

She and four other Latvian women in similar straits worked at Chicago area clubs, including the Admiral, Heavenly Bodies, Thee Dollhouse, Skybox and Crazy Horse 2. She danced topless at several of them. "We were just trapped inside the house. Just waiting. What is going to be the next thing?" Z said.

When she arrived in Chicago in October 1996, her captors initially showed some kindness. But it was a month before they were allowed out of the Mount Prospect apartment where they were held, and then it was only for a drive to see the sights of downtown Chicago. After that, they were rarely allowed out, and the phone was removed when they were left alone.

If they needed to buy something -- even shampoo -- a list was made and Mishulovich's crew would go shopping.

The girls were given movies to watch -- "Showgirls'' and "Striptease'' -- to learn how to dance exotically.

They drank to cope with the situation. They got depressed.

And they danced. Many nights Mishulovich watched and critiqued.

The threat of physical violence was constant. And at times, the men threatened to sell the women for sex.

The first beating that Z recalls came after Mishulovich first told the girls they'd be stripping, and one complained. Mishulovich continually harassed the girls for sex or walked into the bathroom while they were showering, Z said.

At other times, he threatened them with a gun, holding it against their temples.

For a time, they were forced to live with his mother, who, depending on her mood, either cooked for them or called them whores, Z said.

The worst beating came several months after they arrived, when Z and another girl tried to escape. They agreed to meet a man they had befriended at a club and planned to ask him for help. She recalls going to a McDonald's or Wendy's -- she can't remember for sure -- and being dragged out and beaten on her head and in the stomach by Mishulovich and another man with him.

"I got the most,'' Z said. "They used their hands. They used their legs. I was on the floor.''

The racket unravels



At a Loop diner, FBI Special Agent Michael Brown spreads the glossy pictures out across the table.

There's Mishulovich, in bookish glasses with a bald head and stubbly beard.

There's Vadim Gorr, a young- and innocent-looking tough, who, according to the feds, drove the women to their jobs and held them against their will.

There's a stern Rudite Pede, with close-cropped bleached blond hair. She's Mishulovich's wife and helped recruit some of the women in Latvia, assuring them the way only a woman could that they'd be safe and the work was respectable, federal officials said. Her friend and look-alike is Dace Mediniece, who came to Chicago on false documents, officials said.

There's Sergei Tcharouchine, 42, with longish blond hair and good looks, peering out from a wanted poster. He remains at large. He allegedly organized the ring with Mishulovich.

All ended up charged by the feds with playing roles in an illegal human trafficking operation, an investigation Brown was central in.

Except for Tcharouchine, all have been convicted of, at the least, visa fraud.

Mishulovich, 44, was sentenced to about nine years in prison. He's jailed on his involuntary servitude conviction at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop and is slated for release in fall 2006. Through a prison official, Mishulovich declined to comment.

Mediniece, 26, Pede, 28, and Gorr, 35, have all been released on parole.

Brown said Mishulovich exerted control over the women by demeaning them, telling them they'd committed a crime coming into the country, that his U.S. citizenship gave him more credibility with police.

Born in Russia, he's a naturalized American citizen whose family fled the Soviet Union in 1981 because they faced persecution over their Jewish faith, court documents say.

At one point Mishulovich took a locket from one of the captive girls that contained a picture of her mother and said he'd send it home to the Russian mafia if she didn't cooperate, Brown said. Mishulovich would boast he was in the Chechen mob and could have their families killed back in Latvia.

Brown spent about six months unraveling the group's scheme -- beginning in March 1998 -- because of an astute State Department worker in Riga who was suspicious of Mishulovich and fired off two notes about him to federal authorities. Before agents got Mishulovich and the others, they had released the women, in part because they knew federal agents were onto them, and because they were arguing with each other.

Z was simply rounded up one day in July 1997 by her captors and dropped off at O'Hare with her passport and a ticket to Riga. She thinks she had about $40 in her pocket. And she thinks she took a taxi home from the airport in Riga.

Despite her relief at being free, she didn't hesitate to return to the United States within the year. She wanted to start a new life. Later, she connected with the feds and cooperated with them against Mishulovich's crew.

Brown, who spent days and nights putting the complicated picture together, muses that the tale is practically movie-quality.

Five women lured here, abused and forced into the sex trade. The infighting among the captors. The attempted escape. But there doesn't seem to be a smooth ending to any of this, he said.

"When I look back at this now, the thing that sticks with me the most is the long-lasting effects on the victims,'' Brown said recently, over lunch near the Dirksen Federal Building, where the case was prosecuted. "These ladies, they were just young. Students. They were scared to death.''

Stripper: 'This is what I am'

Z's own emotional recovery continues.

Walking into large rooms causes her to panic sometimes because she feels everyone is looking at her, judging her. Trusting men has been a challenge, although she is in a relationship now. She has a recurring vision of walking onto a plane and bumping into one of her captors.

And she has grown incensed by messages in the mass media -- beer commercials for example -- that suggest women are objects. Some days she thinks she will volunteer for a women's rights organization.

Brown occasionally hears from the women. They've scattered. Some went back to Latvia, some are still here. One had a child. One shocked Brown when he asked her what she was doing with her life. Stripping, she said.

"I've come to the conclusion,'' she told him, "that this is what I am."

Starting over

Z grew up about 10 minutes from the Baltic Sea, where a large forest opens to sand dunes and slopes down to the beach.

"The beaches are Nordic, the water is cold,'' she said. "It's completely different colors. It's beautiful in a different way. It's more gray. The sand is not as white. It's kind of wild, but it's nice."

Today she is just as close to a beach that is more tropical. She's happy here now, rebuilding her life, with a new condo, a good job prospect and family and friends around her.

"I knew without those people I could make something good,'' she said. "I just saw things. I saw the life. I know it is possible if you are not trapped like that.''

HUMAN TRAFFICKING: BY THE NUMBERS
$250,000: The amount of profit that can be made from one woman

600,000-800,000: The number of people trafficked each year, according to the State Department

14,500-17,500: The number of people who are trafficked into the United States each year.

321%: The increase in investigations by the Justice Department between 2001 and 2004.

375%: The increase in Justice Department prosecutions (2001-2004)

200%: The increase in Justice Department convictions (59 to 11 between 2001-2004

The US Government is just as responsible for this as the slave smugglers.

This is Open Borders; this is Turning a Blind Eye to Immigration Law; this is abandoning the Rule of Law; this is "come to America for money"; this SUCKS!!

This is nauseating!!

This is Third World Sewer!!

This is what the past 3 Presidents from Yale University and members of the secret Skull and Bones have done to the reputation, security, and condition of the United States of America.

9 years in prison is all this SOB gets?

Mishuluvich....is he an American Citizen?

He doesn't sound like one.

www.suntimes.com

Part 2
Warnings human trafficking taught to children
August 8, 2005

BY ANNIE SWEENEY Crime Reporter


RIGA, Latvia -- She was 17, the daughter of unemployed alcoholics in a struggling country where good work can be difficult to find.

So she took a job that, though it required leaving the Baltic state, would help pay the family's bills.

She was going to pick strawberries in Finland.

But as her new employers drove across the Latvian border and into Estonia, everything changed.

She was ordered to take off her clothes and pose for photos that would be posted on the Web.

One snapshot shows her wearing only a black bikini bottom, coyly hiding behind an overgrown plant. Another has her arched against a cinderblock wall. If you didn't know better, you'd think she wanted to be there.

She made it to Finland all right, but as a virtual slave who was forced to work as a prostitute and give almost all of her earnings to her captors.

It's a story too often told in Latvia, which became a hotbed for "human trafficking" after gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Ironically, this recent freedom has helped fuel the modern slave trade -- in which women are tricked or forced into leaving their homes and, often, entering the sex industry -- because of the country's slow crawl toward economic vitality.

Latvia's position in the global problem of human trafficking has forced it -- and many other nations -- to better confront the horror of people being bought, sold and used.


Special Report
• Part I: A victim speack
• Part II: Battling the problem
• Tuesday: Teen trafficking in Chicago

Related Graphic
• Preying on Eastern Europe

In Chicago, five Eastern Europeans were prosecuted in the late '90s for virtually enslaving five Latvian women who were forced into stripping at clubs. Since then, the U.S. government has stepped up, prosecuting more cases, creating new laws and dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars and other resources to combatting the problem and helping the victims.
Latvia -- which is trying to shed its image as a "provider" nation -- has done similar things, including embarking on graphic education campaigns and establishing tougher criminal penalties for people traffickers. There's also an increased focus on training for police and social workers in dealing with the victims.

Despite the breadth of the problem, it's something most Americans don't know about or really understand.

"They think it's something out of Grade B movies,'' said Landon R. Taylor, the consul at the U.S. Embassy in Riga.

"But trafficking in persons either is -- or is well on its way to -- becoming the largest source of revenue for organized criminal activity in the world, supplanting trade in illegal arms and trade in illegal drugs," Taylor said. "Trafficking is . . . turning that human being into a commodity.

"That is a fundamental insult to human dignity and human rights," he said. "It violates all the principles that underlie our Constitution.''

Why Latvia?



Latvia is a small country sandwiched between Estonia and Lithuania with a coastline on the Baltic Sea. Russia looms to the east.

Riga, the capital, is bustling, the cobble-stoned streets filled with young, fashionable people. Flower stalls and comfortable cafes dot nearly every corner.

Tourism seems to be taking off -- Ryan Air now shuttles groups of English and Irish tourists for weekend trips.

This is all new for Latvia. A former Soviet bloc country, it has only been independent since 1991. It joined the EU in 2004, securing some hope of funding and support from its larger, thriving neighbors.

But for now its economy ranks near the bottom. And the transition from Soviet control -- while liberating philosophically -- was not practically easy. Newly ushered-in values of freedom and individualism clashed with an economy built around governmental control and support.

With their economy pulled out from under them, many Latvians were left without a way to earn a living and support a family. Many fell ill to social diseases such as alcoholism and drug abuse, said Liesma Ose, a Latvian social work professor who recently taught and conducted research at Dominican University in River Forest. "It happened so fast it was really hard to adjust," she said.

This is what likely made women here prey to traffickers, and once women are taken into a different country, they are unlikely to turn to police for help, experts said. "In the post-Soviet society, police are a source of danger," Ose said.

Another Dominican professor, Mark Rodgers, traveled to Riga in April to train police, prosecutors and social workers on how to deal with trafficking. He said hundreds of thousands of women are trafficked in Europe annually, and as many as three-quarters come from former Eastern bloc states.

In London alone, as many as 80 percent of the women in the city's sex industry are from those countries.

"Profits are stunning," Rodgers said. "The CIA calculates that profits from one trafficked woman alone averages $250,000."

While it is not as common for women to be trafficked to the United States, Chicago is linked to the Eastern European problem through a 1997 case in which a Russian-born man named Alex Mishulovich, along with others, set up a trafficking ring in Chicago, luring five women from Latvia by inviting them to work "high-end'' jobs as dancers in Chicago clubs.

They were all promised that the dancing would not involve nudity and that they'd each make about $60,000 a year, court documents show.

Once here, things changed drastically. Mishulovich's crew took the women's immigration papers and forced them to live together in tiny apartments outside Chicago, paid them as little as $20 a night and restricted their phone and outside privileges.

Change in the wind



A lot has changed in Latvia since Mishulovich trolled the streets for victims.

In the past two years, the country has taken a hard look at what was happening -- including people being lured off the streets -- and how to stop it, Taylor said.

Laws were strengthened and penalties were increased, he said. Police are going after more cases, and cops and social workers are being trained to recognize the problem and make sure victims get services. The government is working on opening a shelter for victims.

Children are being educated at a very young age -- in a way similar to America's anti-drug messages -- that they must be careful of strangers who might exploit them. For example, elementary- and high school-age kids watch movies with anti-trafficking themes.

The message was brought home most forcefully in a recent campaign that showed a woman dangling like a puppet from fish hooks, her skin stretched.

Women's groups in Latvia also have launched attacks on advertising they believe reinforces the idea that people are for sale. For example, they've challenged a local grocery store ad hawking items for a "two-for-one" sale that shows a man with a bride on each shoulder and the words, "Buy one get another free."

Still, the Latvian government has yet to commit a regular line-item in its budget to the problem, although a regular funding stream was agreed to in a 2004 anti-trafficking action plan, Taylor said.

Yet another area the country is struggling with is changing the mind-set of the people in law enforcement. Even some women who agree to work abroad in the sex industry can be trafficked, he said.

"People are still coming to grips with this problem and what it means," he said.

'Greedy, greedy people'



As part of this new emphasis on the crime, police in Latvia recently busted the trafficking ring that tricked the 17-year-old woman into thinking she'd be picking strawberries for the summer.

Reinis Janevics, a soft-spoken Latvian cop with a good grasp of English, worked on the case. He has dealt with several trafficking victims, as has Dr. Tatiana Kurova, a determined social worker.

Both attended the training seminar in April and told stories about how traffickers prey on the weak and use vulnerabilities -- lack of a job, for example, or having a child who needs support -- to their advantage. Sometimes they even manage to convince women that the lifestyle is a good one.

"They use that problem," said Janevics, 26. "She earns some money and is happy with that. They think, 'Yes, I have a business relationship. It's normal.'"

But many times the women are devastated, like one Kurova met at the Riga airport after she was found in a Vienna hospital, unable to speak about what had happened to her. She was trafficked to Germany after being told she'd wash floors. Instead, she was forced to work in a brothel, and somehow ended up in Austria, Kurova said.

Kurova, with a round face and no-nonsense hair, is a fireplug of a woman and has the edge of a PTA mother in a fight with bureaucrats for more money for schools. She speaks mostly in Russian, her native tongue, but manages in English.

The woman at the hospital had suffered a mental breakdown. She was counseled by a priest, who managed to figure out she was Latvian. He then found Kurova's group on the Internet and contacted her. Kurova arranged to get the woman back home, meeting her at the airport.

"She cry and cry and cry. She can't say nothing,'' said Kurova, who has been involved in social services in Riga for years and now runs an organization called GENDERS. "I say simply, 'Keep my hand and let's go.'"

From there, Kurova went to the Latvian government for money and help.

Janevics, who has closely cropped hair and wears suits, has interviewed countless victims and looked into the lives of various traffickers, whom he calls "greedy, greedy people."

It is hard on victims, he thinks, sometimes to even talk to men after their experiences, so he always conducts interviews in cafes to help them relax. He remembers one who shook every time a man walked past her.

Janevics tries to stay in touch with the victims he's helped and has seen the difficulty they sometimes have returning to a normal life.

The 17-year-old girl is back in Riga. She's dating someone and is trying to straighten things out. But this is only after she returned to Finland to work as a hooker for a second time, Janevics said.

He thinks the teen went back partly because her traffickers threatened her and her family. But the cop has another theory. After a while she gave in a bit, accepting their version that this was an opportunity.

"After some time, you break something inside," Janevics said, leaning back in his chair, fiddling with a stapler.